Hannah Arendt: The Clothes of the Empress

The debate sparked by Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem is almost as disturbing as the book itself. A good many qualified reviewers in various journals have attacked not only Miss Arendt’s views but the scholarship on which her conclusions are presumably based. Numerous vital errors and misstatements of fact have been pointed out by her critics. Her champions, however, have in no instance bothered to take cognizance of such factual objections. The readers outraged by Justice Musmanno’s harsh review in The New York Times Book Review made no attempt to argue on the basis of the factual material adduced by the Justice; instead, they excoriated his failure to grasp the author’s deep insights. The...